This Week's Bestsellers: October 1, 2018

Work It

A trio of authors who made their names in other creative arenas debut with three of the top 10 books in the country.

#2 Whiskey in a Teacup, a lifestyle title, is Academy Award–winning actor and Emmy Award–winning producer Reese Witherspoon’s first book, though she’s made her presence felt across publishing thanks to her popular Instagram book club.

#3 Cravings: Hungry for More follows up model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook debut, 2016’s Cravings. That title has sold 434K print copies, and its sales for the most recent week are up 255% compared to the week before.

#5 In Pieces is two-time Academy Award winner and three-time Emmy Award winner Sally Field’s memoir. The actor told PW, in a pre-BookExpo 2018 interview, that she began writing it in 2011, when her mother died: “I didn’t know what needed resolving, so I just started writing.”

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Wild Ride

YA author Marie Lu completes her Warcross duology with Wildcard, #4 in children’s frontlist fiction, which our starred review called an “action-packed escapade with a thoughtful, emotion-driven core,” one that’s “sure to inspire even deeper devotion among Lu’s fans.” First-week print unit sales are better than Lu’s seen since the final book in her career-launching Legend trilogy, 2013’s Champion.

Leading the Way

A pair of historians have new books about these United States.

At #6 in hardcover nonfiction, #8 overall, Leadership by Doris Kearns Goodwin is, our starred review said, a “thoughtful revisiting of the lives of four presidents to whom she has previously dedicated individual books,” examining how Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson handled “the major challenges that confronted them as presidents.”

In These Truths, #8 in hardcover nonfiction, New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a “probing political history of the United States,” our review said, putting forth “evenhanded assessments of latter-day partisan wrangles.”

New & Notable

Lethal White
Robert Galbraith
#1 Hardcover Fiction, #7 overall
The author otherwise known as J.K. Rowling “impressively sustains suspense over the course of a lengthy mystery in her fourth outing for London PI Cormoran Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott,” our starred review said.

My Struggle: Book Six
Karl Ove Knausgaard
#15 Hardcover Fiction
“The final book of Knausgaard’s six-volume masterpiece,” our starred review said, “goes maximalist and metatextual, examining the impact that the autobiographical series has had on the author’s life and the lives of those around him.”

Top 10 Overall

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.